The Best of All Possible Worlds?

Have you ever had one of those surreal sort of moments where you suddenly have no idea who--or more significantly, what--you even are? One minute, you're innocently considering something as mundane as whether it's time to pluck your eyebrows because they're getting pretty unruly and maybe you-- then BAM. Who is this creature staring back at you in the mirror? Is that really you? And who is this voice wondering this in your head? Is this your soul talking? Your brain? All of a sudden, you're suffering a crisis of human consciousness: you feel absolutely disconnected from your body, from the world. You're trapped inside this weird fleshy shell and you're absolutely alone and is it any of this real anyway?

 I've had one of these experiences several times over the course of my life, but generally after a minute and a half or so of absolute bewilderment at my being, the feeling passes and I'm a normal person again. However, it seems that René Descartes had one of these episodes, and rather than letting it go, felt compelled to write Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he navigates the quandary of our existence.

For Descartes, the key to knowing anything is to first doubt absolutely everything. The way we know that we do, indeed, exist, is by having little mental meltdowns like the one described above--it is simply by wondering what we are that we find the truth: "I am a thing that thinks" (33).  The argument that particularly perplexes me, however, is found in his fourth meditation, when he considers the ability of a perfect God to create imperfection. While indeed I and Descartes both wonder why God would make humans so flawed if he is all-powerful, Descartes suggests that perhaps that despite the seeming imperfection of each of us as individuals,  we could be "very perfect when considered as constituting a part of this whole universe" (53). This calls to mind the ideas of Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide: that we live in the "best of all possible worlds." Though each of us is undeniably far from perfect, when taken as a whole, are we fulfilling a larger purpose of perfection? Is the world exactly as it should be?  . Are our short-comings carefully crafted to create an ultimately flawless long-run?  Though Voltaire seemed to mock these ideas, Descartes, I think, would find some merit in Pangloss's optimism. Then again, Voltaire also thought that one could only know what one perceived through the senses, so he and Descartes would have likely disagreed on a lot of things. But the significance is not, perhaps, in whether Descartes or Voltaire is  right about the nature of the universe--but simply that they considered their place in the universe at all. Perhaps to ask these questions was their finite purpose in the infinite world order.

Is that what we are? A cog in an infinite system? Is that why we think? Are we given these abstract constructions of reality by God himself? Like Descartes, I feel compelled to ask these questions but unlike him, I feel no such authority in answering them. All I know is that I am--and frankly, even that seems debatable at this point.